Fountain Pen + Watch Guts = $105,000 CEO Switchblade

This is one crazy-ass pen. Joe Brown

Is there anything more technologically ironic than the holy holy holy union of a mechanical watch and a fountain pen? Who cares, Richard Mille‘s new S05 Mechanical Fountain Pen is every kind of awesome and one other kind of awesome that hasn’t been invented yet. Remove the cap, press the button on the end, and the so-called recoil escapement pushes the white gold nib out of the front of the pen.

Recoil escapement. Can’t just throw that term out without explaining it, so here: A recoil escapement is a series of interconnected levers, gears, and springs that stores energy with the intention of releasing it in a pushing or striking motion. In the watch world, you’ll most often see it used in minute repeaters, watches that will chime the time when you hit a button. Safe to say this is the only fountain pen that uses it. You “reload” the pen when you put the cap back on—transferring mechanical energy back into the escapement.

After all that wizardry, it’s easy to overlook the pen’s exterior, which itself is pretty cool: it’s NPTP carbon, the same material used in the sails of racing yachts.

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You Only Need to Wind This Watch Every Month and a Half

Joe Brown/ WIRED

Typical mechanical watches go a handful of days at most before they require winding. This prototype from new watchmaker (that means it’s 20 years-old…) Parmigiani can go 45 days. By the time the Senfine hits production, the company hopes it will last 70. Senfine means “eternally” in Esperanto. Esperanto, the utopian language of William Shatner and a future in which traditional mechanical watches run forever.

The Senfine’s movement is based on a design by Swiss physicist Pierre Genequand who approached the problem of increasing power reserve by reducing parasitic loss instead of adding energy. He built a tabletop-size model of the system to prove that it worked, and then sold the idea to Parmigiani, who shrank it down and crammed it into a watch.

The design combines several elements of the watch’s movement—the balance, balance-spring, and pallet fork, for those of you who speak horology nerd—into a single piece of silicon. This eliminated joints that sapped energy from the system as the components rubbed together. To further reduce friction, Genequand also suspended the regulator—the collection of parts that controls the watch’s speed—instead of mounting it on an axis. A typical axis-mounted regulator can lose up to 65 percent of its power due to friction. Speaking through two translators, I was unable to understand what it means to “suspend” a regulator, but THIS WATCH LASTS 45 DAYS AND THEY’RE NOT DONE YET.

The $180,000 Entry-Level Watch

Joe Brown

Never heard of Greubel Forsey? Your yacht must be so small! Don’t worry about it; just sell one of your rental properties in the slums of Monaco, and you’ll be able to afford a Greubel. No rental properties? Haha, OK, this is actually your lucky year.

GF distinguishes itself by using the most advanced watchmaking techniques and the most expensive materials. Its watches start at $325,000 and go up to $688,000. They contain some of the most detailed, complex movements in the industry. Some contain microscopic sculptures you can’t even see without magnification.

The company founders, however, realized that there was an untapped market in the 99-percent of the One Percent, and challenged their master watchmaker to create a piece they could sell for less than 200,000 Swiss Francs.

He came up with this watch, the Signature 1. It’s still not cheap at $180,000; every single component—every gear, spring, lever, and so on—is hand-made in house, using highest grade precious metals. It’s finished with the most labor-intensive Swiss techniques. And though it skips showy features like a tourbillon and an automatic movement, the watch is actually a lot more normal-looking than some of its fancier options. Which might actually appeal to its core super-rich customers as well. (You know, for the gym.)

The Watch Nerd’s Watch: All About Precision

Joe Brown/WIRED

Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak is one of those famous watches. The style has been around forever, and AP’s watchmakers are constantly ramming crazy new features and innovations into it. This year, they made it open-worked, which means you can see through the movement from top to bottom—a real challenge when you consider all the structural and mounting considerations you need to take into account when putting a multi-hundred-part machine in the middle of something you can strap around the smallest part of your arm.

The coolest part of this watch, though, is its double balance wheel: that small golden circle in the lower-right corner of the photo above. The balance wheel is one of the key places a watchmaker can adjust a timepiece to make it more accurate. The wheel itself is studded with eight tiny, horseshoe-shaped weights. Turn the horseshoe so that its closed end faces either the inside or outside of the wheel, and you’re shifting a very small amount of mass, gently influencing the spin speed of the wheel.

The more of those weights you have, the more precisely you can adjust the watch’s speed. You could just put a larger balance wheel in the movement, providing more room for weights around its perimeter, but, again, there are those space considerations. In order to keep its movements small, AP just stacked two balance wheels on top of each other. Voila, twice the number of weights. Added bonus: You can see the top balance wheel through the face of the watch, and the bottom one through the back. The stainless steel version will run you $44,100.

Awesome Molded Carbon Watch Is the Antidote to Carbon Fiber

You walk into the Roger Dubuis booth at this year’s SIHH, and you’ll see a lot of vintage couture dresses, models, and brightly colored watches studded with gems. Famous for its devotion to high-touch—and high-gloss—Swiss watchmaking techniques, this brand is… not subtle. But it does some sick work. Its new $58,800 Excalibur Automatic Skeleton Carbon fits the type.

The watch’s exterior manages to strike the seemingly impossible average between matte and hella-flashy, with varying shades of gray shard flickering in the light. Those are bits of carbon—sans the tacky, plaid-out, visible weave that only belongs in vehicles but somehow ends up on every tasteless doohicky in the world. Dubuis’ carbon is mixed with resin and pressed around a titanium skeleton under high heat and high pressure. The technique is proprietary, but it avoids a problem common to carbon watches: they huge. Though the Excalibur is not a small watch at 42mm-wide, it’s not any larger than the gold version of the same watch.

If the outside doesn’t catch your eye, the giant see-through movement with the sparkly star in the middle might. This is the interior of its skeleton case, and its notable because it functions as the watch’s internal structure, mounting points for the movement and dial all at the same time. The star is a common motif in Dubuis watches, and, fun fact, that shape’s inspiration was the wheel of Product Strategy Director Gregory Bruttin’s Ducati motorcycle. Can you see it? You love this watch now, right?

Richard Lange Jumping Second: Simple Watch, Super Complex

Super-complicated watches usually leverage their labyrinthine mechanical guts to do something special: display the phase of the moon, function as a stopwatch, chime the time on demand, and more. This watch, however, musters its 390 hand-crafted components to make the second hand jump through its 60 increments instead of sweep. Super unusual! The hallmark of a mechanical watch—a point of boasting, even—is traditionally its sweeping second hand; why undo that? “It’s more accurate,” says a master watchmaker at A. Lange & Sohn, who declined to give his name because that is how things are done here in Fantasyland. The idea is that if you’re timing something—your pulse, the bloom on a cup of hipster coffee, how long your servant takes to arrive with your Campari and Soda—the precision of a jumping second is ideal.

Another feature in pursuit of accuracy: When you pull the crown out, the second hand resets to the 12 o’clock position; so when you push it back in, the watch starts at the exact minute you selected. That may seem like a small detail, but it required roughly 90 parts to achieve.

And while many high-end mechanical watches feature a power reserve indicator that shows how much time you have left before you need to wind it again, this one takes a simpler approach: A red triangle appears in the center of its face when you’re ten hours from empty. Like the low-fuel light on your car. Except this costs more than your car: €78,800.

Lange is one of the few German watchmakers at SIHH, but they’re also one of the coolest manufacturers here. Founded in 1845 in Glashütte, Germany, Lange produced killer watches for more than a century. The company’s location, unfortunately, was almost its undoing. Glashütte was in East Germany, near Dresden; in 1948 the Soviet government seized Lange’s property and buildings, and shut the company down. It sat abandoned until 1990, when the founder’s great-grandson brought the company back to life. How can you not root for these guys? Today they’re considered some of the best watchmakers in the world.

The Watch With the Magical Floating Movement

Joe Brown

You think Cartier just makes pretty things? You are wrong. Thanks in large part to their genius master watchmaker, Carole Forestier, it makes some incredibly cool watches whose beauty is way beyond aesthetic. The Astroystérieux is a prime example. Because it is crazy. Its tourbillon movement floats in the middle of the watch’s clear face. Look as hard as you want, you won’t see any visible supports. That movement is suspended on 4 transparent sapphire discs that anchor to the watch’s perimeter. And the guts don’t just sit there in the middle: They rotate in sync with the minute hand, completing a revolution every hour. Cartier will only make 100 of these, and they’ll sell for €145,000.

Insane Timepieces from the World’s Most Exclusive Watch Show

RICHARD JUILLIART/AFP/Getty Images

Most people who know watches know Baselworld—the annual Swiss expo where everyone from Swatch to Shinola to Rolex show off their wares. It’s amazing, but its extravagant booths and public face are the opposite end of the spectrum from the lesser known SIHH: the Salon International de la Haute Horologie. That’s French for “International Supermegafancy Watch Show,” and it’s lower-profile because it’s not open to the public.

Tucked inside a smallish convention center in Geneva, Switzerland, SIHH looks like the high street of a wealthy Swiss mountain town: cream colored storefronts that mostly distinguish themselves by the names above the doors and the watches in their windows. Don’t spend too long looking at the outside of the booths, though; the watches here, from brands like A. Lange & Söhn, Cartier, IWC, and Jaeger-LeCoultre, are insane.

This is the forefront of modern watchmaking, with mechanical and metallurgical wizards showing off depth and complexity that will give you vertigo if you stare deeply enough. You won’t find a quartz oscillator or a battery here, but you will find the culmination of hundreds of years of Swiss innovation: tiny apparati that dazzle with their genius and precious metals. No, these don’t tell time as well as your smartphone or Apple Watch, but that is 100-percent not the point. These watches are wearable art: hundreds of components, hundreds of hours of hand crafting, and centuries of knowledge distilled into tiny machines you can wear on your wrist. Megacities of gears and springs that harness the power of twisted knob or a waved arm to create a subtle, consistent tick.

Here you can find watches that cost into the seven-figure range, but that’s not always where the coolest stuff is. We’re here in search of the coolest applications of materials science, miniaturization, and raw innovation. Stay tuned.

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